Macworld Expo 2006 in Review

Friday, 20 January 2006

New Hardware: iMac Core Duos and MacBook Pros

If we’re going to talk about this year’s show, we’ve got to talk about
the new hardware first. Years from now, all we’ll remember MWSF 2006
for is the introduction of Intel-based Macs, the first Intel-based
computers in Apple’s 30-year history.

Sure, I predicted Apple wouldn’t yet announce Intel Macs at MWSF,
but I wasn’t surprised that they did. My main reason for thinking they
wouldn’t do so yet is that they’d catch too many third-party
developers while they were still putting their universal-binary pants
on. But Apple never promised any particular ship date, other than
“before” this year’s WWDC, and the modern era Apple doesn’t exactly
bend over backwards to please third-party developers.

So but what did surprise me is that both of the new Intel-based
machines are using the existing enclosure designs.1 I can’t recall a single previous
instance when Apple switched to a new processor family without
introducing new case designs, and the switch to Intel processors is as
big a switch as they’ve ever made, certainly a bigger deal than, say,
the switch from G3s to G4s, or G4s to G5s — all of which transitions
coincided with the introduction of new case designs.

[Update: Apparently my recollection of the first batch of PowerPC
Macs is just plain wrong; numerous readers have pointed out that the
first three Power Macs — the 6100, 7100, and 8100 — used the same
cases as the Quadra 610, 650, and 800/840AV, respectively.]

It hadn’t even crossed my mind that they might do this, introduce
Intel-based Macs identical in outer appearance to existing PowerPC
Macs. I suspect many others had a similar blind spot: one reason no
one predicted Intel-based iMacs for MWSF is that the iMac G5 got a
refreshed case design just a few months prior. If you assumed, as I
did, that Apple’s first Intel-based iMacs would ship with a new case
design, you had to figure they’d be coming later in 2006, so as to
give the still-new iMac G5 case a reasonable lifespan.

But in hindsight, I think I see Apple’s strategy. Internally, these
new computers are almost completely different than their PowerPC
brethren; but by using the same outer appearance, it reinforces the
message that this transition is intended to be smooth. A shift, not a
schism.

This is further reinforced by the fact that neither Intel-based Mac
replaces any PowerPC models; both the iMac G5 and 15-inch PowerBook G4
are still for sale. This positions the Intel-based models more like
siblings than successors.

If you have any sort of technical background in software, you probably
understand that this transition is quite significant. But Apple’s
message to consumers is, “It’s just a Mac with a faster processor.”
Point being that the technical problems are for Apple and Mac
developers to worry about, not Mac users.

Nevertheless, I expect to see next-generation cases for at least some
of the Intel-based Macs to be released in the first half of this year.

A few other observations regarding the new hardware:

The new iMacs have a DVI port and explicitly support spanning
desktops with a secondary display. This is the first time an iMac
has had this feature.

Real-world benchmarks — as opposed to the utterly useless
SPECmark benchmarks Apple is using promotionally — show that the
iMac Core Duos are faster than iMac G5s, but not amazingly so.
Macworld’s benchmarks peg them at about 25-50 percent faster when
running native universal binary apps. It shouldn’t be surprising
that the results aren’t more dramatic, because the G5 is a
terrific processor. I expect comparisons between the
not-yet-released MacBook Pro and PowerBook G4 to be much more
dramatic (although almost certainly far short of Apple’s claim of
“4-5x faster).

User interface snappiness seems to be the most noticeable
improvement, and has been mentioned by everyone I know who already
has an iMac Core Duo. Michael Tsai and Dan Benjamin both
specifically mentioned that window resizing in particular is much
improved.

Rosetta performance is respectable. Macworld’s benchmarks peg it
at about the speed of a 1 GHz G4 machine; not bad at all.
Photoshop jockeys are going to want to wait until Adobe releases
universal binaries before they buy Intel-based hardware, but for most
users, including Microsoft Office users, this should be good enough.

The system software libraries, frameworks, and applications on
the Intel-based Macs are universal binaries, but, the disk
partition format is different than on PowerPC Macs. From the
updated Universal Binary Programming Guidelines:

The standard disk partition format on an Intel-based Macintosh
computer differs from the disk partition format of a
PowerPC-based Macintosh computer. If your application depends on
the partitioning details of the disk, it may not behave as
expected. Partitioning details can affect tools that examine the
hard disk at a low level.

By default, internal hard drives on Intel-based Macintosh
computers use the GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme and external
drives use the Apple Partition Map (APM) partition scheme. To
create an external USB or FireWire disk that can boot an
Intel-based Macintosh computer, select the GPT disk partition
scheme option using Apple Disk Utility. Starting up an
Intel-based Macintosh using an APM disk is not supported.

As I read it, what this means is that for the time being, you
cannot create an external hard drive that can boot both an
Intel-based and PowerPC Mac.

The MacBook Pro isn’t shipping with a built-in modem, which has
provoked some misguided ire from those who still use dial-up
connections. Apple didn’t drop the built-in modem because they
think no one uses modems any more; they dropped it because few
enough people do that it isn’t worth making every MacBook owner
pay for one. Just like when Apple dropped floppy drives — it
wasn’t as though the floppy was dead, it was just close enough
to dead that it no longer deserved “built-in” status.

On the other end of the spectrum, the MacBook Pro is also missing
the PowerBook G4’s FireWire 800 port. Again, I think this is a
reasonable decision. Most people don’t use FireWire 800; those
that do use FireWire 800 should soon be able to purchase
FireWire 800 ExpressCards, which cards could conceivably offer
two FireWire 800 ports, according to Glenn Fleishman:

Apple vice president David Moody confirmed in a briefing this
afternoon, that Apple thought the best way to provide performance
and flexibility was not to include FireWire 800 as a fixed port
on the models.

Instead, with 2 Gbps of bandwidth from the slot, an ExpressCard
could, for instance, offer two simultaneous FireWire 800 ports
that could run at full speed. This could support an extremely
fast set of RAID 0 (striped) disks, for instance, with four disks
being striped in an A, B, C, D fashion for a total throughput of
1.6 Gbps, limited only by the disks’ read and write speeds.

As for the MacBook Pro’s missing S-video out port, however —
that just stinks. [Update: Apple sells a $19 DVI-to-Video
adaptor, but it’s a nickel-and-dime move not to include it
in the kit for a $2000 laptop. The difference here between S-video
and the modem is that modems are dying — not dead yet but dying
— but S-video output is needed frequently for presentations.]

Regarding Apple’s Hardware Pricing

Many people seem to be surprised by the prices, apparently
under the misguided assumption that Intel = cheap. E.g.: Robert
Scoble’s son Patrick, who expected Intel-based Mac laptops to sell
for $700. (Maybe Apple will release a $700 laptop
— it’s not that far off from the iBook G4’s current $999 starting
price — but if they do, it’s certainly not going to be an ass-kicker
like the MacBook Pro.)

PCs typically cost less than Macs because they’re pieces of crap, not
because Intel CPUs are less expensive than IBM’s or Freescale’s.

And don’t get me started on bullshit like this article, wherein
BusinessWeek writer Arik Hesseldahl attempts to stir up some
shit by casting Apple as a profiteer. The article is headlined “Is the
New iMac a Cash Machine?”, with the sub-head: “Disassembling the first
fruit of the Apple-Intel alliance raises some interesting questions
about the model’s profit margins”. Hesseldahl’s article hinges on an
analysis by a firm named iSuppli, who took apart a $1299 iMac Core Duo
and claim, judging from its components, that it costs Apple $898 to
assemble.

I’m not saying their cost analysis is wrong. I’m saying that even if
it is exactly right (but are they sure it isn’t $899?), there’s
nothing scandalous about it. For one thing, Apple releases its gross
margins in its quarterly financial reports. For the just-ended Q1
2006, Apple reported margins of 27 percent. Selling $1299
computers that cost them only $898 to produce would imply margins of
around 31 percent. Shocking.

But worse, iSuppli’s cost analysis explicity excludes all software and
packaging. By this logic, all of the software bundled on these
machines, including the operating system, must have written itself.
Worse still, at the end of the article, Hesseldahl gets around to
mentioning that Apple almost certainly pays IBM far less for PowerPC
processors than they pay Intel for Core Duos, clearly indicating that
the $1299 iMac Core Duo is probably less profitable for Apple than
the $1299 iMac G5.

The headline and opening paragraphs of the article are clearly
construed to leave casual readers — and those with poor reading
comprehension skills — with the conclusion that Apple is
profiting wildly from the switch to Intel processors, when the
facts
and analyst opinions in the article itself lead to the
completely
opposite conclusion.

Shameless.

Mac OS X 10.4.4, a.k.a. The Widget Release

In addition to the usual round of bug fixes, Mac OS X 10.4.4
contains some noticeable new software: a slew of new and rewritten
Dashboard Widgets.

The new white pages widget, People, is my favorite. I’ve wanted
it ever since I realized that the original PhoneBook widget — now
rechristened “Business” — could only be used to look up business
listings.

The new Address Book widget looks better, but I use Quicksilver
for on-the-fly Address Book lookups so I’ll never use it.

The ESPN widget looks good, but you have to open multiple instances
to track multiple sports. This seems to fit “the Dashboard way”,
however. I probably would have loved this widget back when I
followed college basketball religiously.

The Google widget strikes me as utterly useless. How could
it
possibly be easier to switch to Dashboard mode and enter
your query
in the widget than to just switch to Safari and use
the Google search field there? I can think of two explanations for
this widget’s existence: (a) Google paid for this (see Om Malik’s
report from September on Google paying for preferred treatment in
browser search fields); or (b) it’s a wee bit of spite from
Apple toward Yahoo, their rival widgeteer.

It could just be coincidence, but there’s a bit more visual
consistency with these latest widget revisions. The Address Book,
Google, and People widgets all use very similar color schemes, and the
Business widget is the same but yellow, which makes perfect sense
given its role as a yellow pages front-end.

More disheartening is that fact that the new widgets based on web
services are utterly U.S.-centric: People and Business only query U.S.
phone book listings, and the new Ski Report widget only has data for
U.S. ski resorts. I am fairly certain that at least some people
outside the U.S. have telephones, and that some of them may ski as
well. [Update: I stand corrected, the Ski Report widget does list
Canadian resorts along with at least some in Europe. Point still stands
though that Apple’s widgets in general are U.S.-centric.]

iLife ’06

The big news in iLife ’06 — unless you consider the abolition of
brushed metal windows big news — is iWeb, a new app in the
suite. In a nut, iWeb is more or less Pages for the web — it’s not an
app for designing your own web pages, but rather an app for publishing
your own web pages using templates designed by Apple. It’s
particularly focused on generating pages populated with content from
the other iLife apps. It’s a great idea, very easy to use if you’re
publishing to your .Mac account, and I predict it’s going to prove
quite popular.

iWeb can be used to post to non .Mac servers, but not directly. What
you can do is export to a folder locally on your Mac, then upload that
folder to a server using a standalone SFTP client. Or, if your web
host supports WebDAV (like, say, TextDrive does2), you can mount your
hosted space directly from the Finder as a network volume and save to
it directly from iWeb.

Some of the
features depend on .Mac, however. For example, the slideshow feature
for sets of photos uses an entirely different implementation when you
publish to a folder, because the fancier .Mac version relies on
Ajax, which in turn relies on server software that only runs on
.Mac. This isn’t a complaint — it wouldn’t be possible for Apple to
create an Ajax-powered slideshow that could run on any arbitrary
server.

[Update:Abe Fettig has the scoop on exactly what’s going on
with the .Mac-hosted slideshows; it’s not Ajax, but rather some
custom server software that generates the glass floor reflections
and high-quality thumbnails on-the-fly.]

For comparison’s sake, here’s the same photo set posted to my Flickr
account. I think Apple’s slideshow compares well against
Flickr’s. The only thing I dislike about Apple’s is the reflective
glass floor mirror effect; it’s certainly cool, but I think it’s
unnecessarily distracting for the display of photographs. But Apple’s
slideshow pictures are bigger, and I like their controls better.

As a blogging tool, especially when combined with .Mac publishing,
iWeb is incredibly easy to use. It compares terribly against most
major weblog packages in terms of features3 — because iWeb is a
desktop app that pushes your weblog to the server as a set of static
files, there aren’t any interactive features like comments.4

Where it wins is in ease-of-authoring. You just write, and to add
photos or movies or audio clips, you just drag them into your blog
editing window. And it just works. Apple has completely ignored the
features race in order to concentrate on simplicity and obviousness.
People who have no idea how to publish anything on the web are going
to be able to use iWeb to publish all sort of stuff to the web.

Regarding the XHTML markup iWeb generates, there’s good news and bad
news. The good news is that it validates (as XHTML 1.0 Transitional)
and uses CSS for layout (as opposed to tables). The bad news is that
it pretty much utterly ignores tag semantics, and the CSS is
sprinkled around inline in the markup. E.g., instead of wrapping
paragraphs with <p> tags, perhaps with a class attribute, iWeb wraps
them with:

<div class="paragraph Body" style="line-height: 20px;">

This is disappointing, but not outrageous. Scott Stevenson likes the
photo gallery feature and his first impression was that iWeb’s
markup was pretty good. Stevenson is a very smart guy, but he’s not a
professional web developer, and I suspect his perspective on iWeb’s
markup is similar to that of the engineers on the iWeb team.

I have a feeling the iWeb engineers were expecting praise for the fact
that the markup iWeb produces validates; instead, most of the reaction
from the web-development community has been focused on the semantics,
and the descriptions are using harsh words like “awful” and
“atrocious”.

The reasons why iWeb would do well to generate more semantic markup
are multitudinous, but I won’t waste time covering them here. My
suggestion to the iWeb team: buy yourselves a copy of Jeffrey
Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards, or, better yet, get
Apple to cough up the dough to fly Mr. Zeldman out for a few hours of
consultation.

My point being that iWeb’s XHTML generator is not atrocious; it is
trying to do the right thing but has fallen short. It should be
improved, not scrapped.

It seems like every January during his keynote, Steve Jobs demos a
new version of iPhoto and says that, finally, the new version is
faster. This year it’s actually true. iPhoto 6 is just terrific:
way faster than iPhoto 5, and consumes significantly less memory
(which two points are quite possibly related).

Speaking of memory consumption, iWeb is a real pig. While
putting together the aforementioned photo galleries, iWeb
consumed over 600 MB of private memory.

iPhoto’s new photocasting feature is a terrific idea: share a
stream of photos via RSS so that your subscribers can be
automatically apprised when new photos are added to the stream.
The implementation, however, is pretty bad. Look no further
than Mark Pilgrim’s “Unofficial Documentation of iPhoto 6.0
Photocasting Feeds”, posted to Apple’s Syndication-Dev
mailing list. Pilgrim’s conclusion pretty much sums it up:

iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the
first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It
ignores features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and
mis-implements features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997.
It ignores 95% of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining
5% wrong.

iWork ’06

I haven’t looked at it yet, but, in a nice move, a 30-day demo
ships in the iLife ’06 package.

Jobs barely touched on either iWork app in his keynote, other
than to show off the way they allow you to create
three-dimensional graphs from two-dimensional data, which you
should never do. Seriously, please, don’t do this.

AppleWorks is dead — it is not included with either of the new
Intel-based Macs. This is why I predicted Apple would announce a
spreadsheet. There is no spreadsheet on these new Macs, other than
a demo version of Excel.

Of course, even if there were a new spreadsheet app in iWork ’06,
it too, like Excel, would only be included as a demo. (iWork is
not included, other than as a demo, with either new machine.) So
maybe the answer is something even simpler — a free app that is
to spreadsheets what TextEdit is to word processors.

The best you can say about AppleWorks, as it stands today, is that
it’s dated — but it works, people absolutely still use it, and
its death leaves a significant hole in Mac OS X’s standard
software line-up.

“Never would we characterize our customers that way,” Intel Vice
President Deborah Conrad said in an interview.

Conrad said that Intel cooperated with Apple for some particulars
of the TV spot, but added, “We didn’t know what the end result
was going to be.”

The company did get a peek at the ad before Tuesday’s keynote,
but it wasn’t too much earlier.

“It’s probably a good thing that we didn’t see them earlier,”
Conrad said.

Don’t believe it. Intel loves this ad. This ad makes Intel
processors look better than any ad Intel has ever produced itself. The
feeling this ad conveys is that Intel’s chips are going to be kicking
some goddamn major ass inside Macs.

The MacBook Pro is slightly thinner and slightly wider than the PowerBook G4, but in practical terms they use the same case design. ↩